Willard Spiegelman

Myles Weber

The Goldilocks Formula

The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer

Crush into These Blakk Feet

Laurence Lieberman

1.

Soaring at heart,
dream kin they may be—Akyem and Basquiat—
though the pair never met: Ras Akyem’s ALTAR both
Requiem for the Dead
and post-mortem revival of the Black
Haitian’s sizzling Raw art . . .
Three panels. A minimalist triptych
in black and white. Two finished versions. One, black-
on-white-backdrop, is the foremost.
The other (reduced
detail, more simplified), white-on-black. See
both. Keep looking at one, the other,
checking it out
feeling your way—
a bridge between them. For one may turn
the other inside out, as an X ray reverses
our human body,
revealing to the doctor’s eye strange
truth of hidden parts.
Black/White inversion—a comment on Race
(false dominance: who is on top, who now on bottom?)—
cannot be lost on the looker . . .
The three tall panels
are thickly white-oil-covered. They mimic
white walls of run-down city buildings
in slum backstreets

mostly ignored by police duos,
where eye-scalding
graffiti spreads like wild ivy vines across
sheets of stone. Bold
lettering travels at all angles,
unstoppable: words often misspelled or crossed-

out and respelled
wrongly, some flickering with sparks
of defiance, genius, gutter jokes, true pain, or
grief. Where they abound,
urban sabotage reeks, for it stinks
of entrails, fish rot,
and gunpowder blent . . . Much white space
in all three panels is crammed with those gray no-color
scrawls, word parts that appear grooved,
dented or scraped
into textured white ooze with the pointy black
end of paint brush. Black under-painting
below the white
surface vaguely shows
through, but blank white space still dominates . . .
Cursory first glance at the tripartite work reveals
three black SAMO heads
upborne near the center of each paintscape.
Those heads, like shaman
masks at Carnival, are death skulls. Squarish
white eyeholes and sinister broad grins of white-toothed
grillwork loom over those narrow
black jaws. Each death
mask hovers in space, neckless, suspended
between two black columns of tombstone.
With Matisselike
spare economy, those fewest black
lines and bars
hint a full monument propped over the still open
grave in each trio
installment. They comprise a trinity
that adds up to one altar: ghoulish faces bobbing

like exhumed mock-
skulls of the martyred hero; or risen
image of his undying soul—perhaps bidden, coaxed,
to ascension by the act
of drafting the art work: MAGICIAN
GURU SHAMAN listed
at lower right, alongside the last
tomb column, exhales overtones of necromancy, witchcraft
from the trancelike cast of square eyes
aglow in those dream-
stark heads. They could be paleolithic faces
lifted intact from cave walls . . .
The altar piece
speaks to us, mostly,
in top-to-bottom sweeps. But each mask, becapped
with its floating halo of KROWN of thorns, shimmers
over those tombside
fragments which, in left-to-right progression
across the three panel
units, come to resemble—more and more—
a human frame: from hips to ankles! And these secondary
horizontal readings of triptych
are adroitly prompted
by a few crossover graffiti that span,
or overlap, the hinges between panels:CRUSH INTO THESE

BLAKK FEET, followed by the form
of actual man foot
in the L-shaped bottom third left tombside,
mimicking the colossal
stone foot of Ramses. Man and monument
blent into a hybrid form at last, the whole series

building toward
this magical fusion—hints of Basquiat’s
Resurrection flashing here . . . Two pairs of long
sinuous black bones
round out the scattered black patches
(oblongs, strips, and glary-eyed
jack-o’-lanterns), spaced over pervasive
white oil portraiture. And SPARE PARTS is deeply etched
above that far left bone set, as if
to say: stray dug-up
bones of Basquiat’s skeleton—femurs, upper leg
thigh bones they may be—are kept
in stock, salvaged
and at the ready,
for use in art, like so many surplus car parts
stored up for repairs. Ras Akyem plies an old bone
kit for refashioning
broken lineaments of the honored dead—
his precursors, ancient
or modern . . . This fantasia compiles graphic
bio of the dead painter, rages to sum up his life story
and art with bare minimal images
or least word scraps.
The more random or accidental they look,
the more those hidden intensities shall
come streaking out . . .

Quite a plunge Ras takes into risky
format—his prior
best works aswirl with rich diversity of colors,
and crammed with a full
mosaic of textured detail. What cost
of Spirit to opt for wide sweeps of blanket WHITE.

2.

WORDS ARE STONES. Graffiti words keep filling the gaps and voids,
blanks, negative space. More
and more, scrawled words must carry
the missing weight—
paint mass of former blocks of color. The few streaks
of tint, bold hue, flare out
starkly, and hurl a challenge at the black-on-white field
that would drive the color items away
or send them diving down below white surface.
Under-layers of orange, green, red
keep peeping out,

here & there. Blunt naked colors may weigh like tarnish on young
black martyr’s spirit, glares
of disrespect for the dead. Mostly,
Ras Akyem carries
that full burden to express multitudes in Blacks & Whites . . .
Perhaps three discrete sets
of offerings hang suspended, afloat, over each fractured
silhouette of black altar and tomb frame.
One little cluster of magic words and fine-line
amulets, per panel. Each set hovers
as if supported

on some invisible altar top: dream platter, shelflike, of unseen
hands. Offerings are held aloft,
so many rich libations to be poured
for that teeming
Spirit . . . LEFT PANEL. The altar top presents a chess-board
pattern of crisscrossing
lines, not unlike smaller line-mesh that mimes a wide grimace
of teeth in the SAMO skulls poised up high.
Two chess pieces—knight & king—appear: perhaps
Basquiat’s knight has already trounced
cocksure White King
since knight is propped squarely on board, king shoved offsides
to the left. The Haitian artist
had won his end game with America, just
before heroin
overdose took him! That chess match replays his street-smart
agile moves to outwit
most art dealers and gallery bosses in his New York heyday …
MIDDLE PANEL. Five-petaled red flower,
pinwheel-shaped, lolls on its stem. Happy blossom
of the Resurrection, it strongly hints
all SAMO heads-

transfixed above-be true ascendant face of the noble dead man.
VOODOO printed to the flower’s
right, an arrow below points across
black altar column
to A. D., orange undercoat showing through the white.
These alphabets glimmer with
sparkles of some formula for raising the dead by Haitian
witchcraft, and bespeak promise of a saving
afterlife for the martyred Ikon. Eerie nostalgias
ripple back to childhood in his homeland …
Follow the arrow

across the panel break. Settle on that simplistic boat. Its one-
masted mini-sail puffed out
over a dugout shape seems to recall
old papyrus boats
sashaying down the Nile, slave ships of Middle Passage,
and those exile vessels
carrying Haitian boat people to America. TO EAST inscribed
above the tiny hull-sail back to your roots?
This transport craft, in turn, beckons overhead
to little red car shaped like a child’s
toy auto labeled

TIN, taking us full-throttle forward to our modem day. A vision
that sweeps with ease and grace
from ancient Egypt and the African
Diaspora to both
artists’ present moment: subject and maker of triptych . . .
RIGHT PANEL. Moving clockwise
from lower left, a card-deck Black Spade x-d out like some
word blocks. (Don’t be fooled. Even Basquiat
confessed he often drew xs or barred lines over
graffiti words to catch more notice—
never to delete,

cancel out, or correct as a grammarian might.) That gamy spade
links up with the chess board’s
vanquished king, the spirit of gamesman-
ship a key motif
of both painters. Above the spade’s inverted heartshape,
note a list of racial slur
words, common street epithets: SPADE NEGROW NIGGA BLAKK
A couple are crossed out as if street thug
is trying to choose among them—checking them
off, one by one, to get it just right
for this occasion.

Alongside the list, find two dangled fishhooks atilt like lures
to catch some passing feeder,
completing the contents of altar three.
Copyright logo,
appended over the hooks, a most telling clue: our painter,
himself, now claims all rights
of purchase. The viewer who nips the hooks and takes the bait,
as one who thinks he knows the true social
heft—or racial bite—of slur words, shall be fooled.
Snared like a caught fish! By image power,
Akyem reowns them

for his key design and art mission. Language, that double-edged
sword, is twisted. The words
lose their sting, taking on positive
nuance—epithet
or smudge now worn like badge of honor. Words of demeaning
poison become war cries
to silence the abusers . . . A black square frame surrounds TAR
within the word ALTAR of the painting’s
title—center panel, bottom. And smears of black,
cagily faking sloppy or careless craft,
run like nosebleed

from the TAR-block down, as if dripping quick off canvas bottom,
exposing bright under-paint
flecks of green. Streaks of whole color leap
out at the eye—
like random ink blots spattered on white backdrop. They steer
the inquiring beholder’s
search for meaning, answers to those riddles set in motion
by leading players in the picture bio . . .
A gold-orange trio, running from diagonal corner
to corner across the whole three-part
expanse, discloses

quiet personal message, or secret confession, from yours truly—
architect of the altar. Gold-
tinged mushrooms, below the Rastafarian’s
witch-doctor list,
reveal his own leaning to hallucinogens, his debt to mind
expanders, a fraternal link
to his sadly O-DEED model. The diagonal gold sweep runs
through red-orange TIN car in mid-panel
upon the small gold crown, upper left, perhaps
reserved for his humble aspiring self,
a would-be Knight

following in his mentor’s art glory path. If that slanted chain
of faint gold figures belongs
to Akyem’s own pnrvate history, unfolding
here in Barbados
today, a mystery triangle of red emblems near the work’s
center—like the Bermuda
Triangle at sea—may decode other puzzle parts. The red smear
under-named SCAR, its low point. High point,
one large red crown, above-named KING PLEASURE.
And the aforementioned five-petaled
red flower forms

isosceles midpoint. While SCAR gash marks out pains and wounds
of Basquiat’s early dying,
flower and KROWN—taken together—radiate
hope of afterlife
sainthood. Or Kingly Resurrection. Altar piece is moulded,
then, both as elegy
tribute, and as maker Akyem’s sacerdotal shaping of his three-
paneled Miracle. He would offer up
his paint flesh as ransom, placed on the altar
shelf of God’s hand—to insure second
life for Basquiat.

Laurence Lieberman's recent books include Flight from the Mother Stone (University of Arkansas Press, 2000), The Regatta in the Skies: Selected Long Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1999), Compass of the Dying (University of Arkansas Press, 1998) and Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets (University of Missouri Press, 1995).